Hints of iGoogle Turning Into Its Own Social Network — Google has long used its personalized homepage, iGoogle, as a launching point for its foray into social-networking applications. Any developer who builds an OpenSocial app, for instance, can make it work as a widget (er, gadget) on iGoogle.

Web 2.0 Expo Preview: Torture by Information Overload — Now that the first burst of enthusiasm for social networking has died, people are realizing that web 2.0 is actually a huge time sink. — Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and Plaxo may have helped foster community and communication …

Twitter: grabbing defeat from the jaws of success — Amazing, Twitter has been half down all weekend long. Dave Winer and others have been writing about it. The problems have been covered on TechMeme and other places where one looks for interesting tech news.

5 reasons my Zune is dead to me — I really wanted to love my 80GB Zune. I'd heard good things about its Wi-Fi and its FM radio, its software, the Zune Marketplace, its easy navigation, and its non-iPod-ness. But then I got it, and now I hate it. Here's why, in ascending order of annoyance.

Weekend Web Weirdness — On Friday, we successfully deployed a new memcache project as part of our overall work to create a more scalable service. After the deploy, we needed to move a lot of data with minimum impact on service quality. To do this, we put together some code that moves data only as it is requested.

Cloud Computing. Available at Amazon.com Today. — Jeff Bezos' store in the sky is hard to beat for books, CDs, and a zillion other products. It's also great for quick technology fixes. Say you need a fat HP server for hosting the too-moronic-to-fail Facebook app you plan to launch next week.

IdeaScale - Crowdsourcing R&D — The hot idea of the moment for large companies is to outsource their research and development efforts to their customers. Who knows your product better than your most loyal fans? If they can collectively agree on the best way to improve it, it must be good, right?

Dilbert.com relaunches with Web 2.0 flavor — Dilbert.com has relaunched and now allows readers to write their own punch lines for strips, as well as a series of other new features. — (Credit: United Media/Scott Adams) — Update: I've added some comments from Scott Adams that came in by email after this posted.

BitTorrent Throttling ISPs Exposed by Azureus — Data collected by the BitTorrent client Azureus shows that Comcast might only be the tip of the iceberg when it comes to BitTorrent throttling ISPs. Early findings show that customers from quite a few other Internet service providers experience an unusually high amount of TCP-resets.

From Bricks and Mortar to Digital Music Master — As music merchants struggle to adapt their business models, one New York shop is embracing the Web — Josh Madell needs to invent a new business model, and soon. The 37-year-old co-owner of Other Music, a New York retailer specializing …

Why ‘no Macs’ is no longer a defensible IT strategy — More users are demanding Macs in the enterprise. Thanks to key computing shifts, supporting their appetite for Apple is now a straightforward option for IT — Once confined to marketing departments and media companies …